It’s April! The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and America is raining death from the skies to distract us all from the Epstein files. Welcome to Slopify, where we lick the internet’s toilet seat to check whether it’s staying hydrated enough.

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🚩 Is this the year (or two) when we all start playing?

I attended a talk by Roosje Klap at the Nieuwe Institut, where she spoke about the upcoming Noorderlicht biennale which will build on the project ‘Homo Ludens’. The presentation was heroically helmed by Saskia van Stein despite featuring an experiment in audience-controlled presentation which was hard to follow or ignore. That aside, the biennale’s theme seems oddly linked to this festival, in Vienna, and this symposium, in Gent. Are we witnessing the beginnings of some sort of new movement rebelling against (gestures broadly) all this bullshit?

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🚩 When the outcomes are known and the athletes are totally optimised, where will sport go next?

A friend, who is a total cycling obsessive, often talks about how cycling as a sport is kind of done. It’s been so totally optimised, and the possible gains are now so marginal, that the only real differentiation comes from discovering new ways to cheat. Well, now AI is getting so good at predicting outcomes that we basically can’t justify watching it at all, I think. So where does sport go next? What sports might fill a gap in which everything can be filmed and everything can be bet on, but anything predictable is already quantified?

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🚩 Turn Your Head Towards The Sun - Naive Weekly

This is perhaps a bit too sincere for this newsletter, but I wanted to draw attention to this remarkable bit of writing by Kristoffer over at Naive Weekly, marking the death of his mother. It’s a singular piece, and I really hope you’ll take five minutes to read it. Kristoffer’s newsletter is always a source of inspiration to me, an immunobooster against the general shittiness of the contemporary internet, and it’s no surprise that he brings that same care and sensitivity into his personal life too. Sterkte, Kristoffer.

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🚩 My Prodigal Brainchild - Neal Stephenson

If you’ve read Snow Crash, you’ll already be familiar with the origin of the Metaverse as a concept (and also with Stephenson’s cringeworthy love of katanas, and the shifts in language and norms that have taken place on subjects of race and age of consent since the 90s…) but this is a great piece of writing. Meta’s metaverse failed because it lacked a plot. Boom.

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🚩 Ijsland - Osama Bin Laden

Just an absolute chune. In honour of the new Powerhouse design for downtown The Hague, as imagined in weird golden glowing tones here.

MVSA Architects en Powerhouse Company ontwerpen dubbele woontoren bij Den Haag Centraal - architectenweb.nl

RED Company heeft met Patrizia SE, Staedion en Bellevue CS The Hague overeenstemming bereikt over de ontwikkeling van de Bellevue-locatie pal naast Den Haag Centraal. Voor de bekroning van de twee torens liggen nog drie varianten op tafel.